Notices by Jamie Teh (jcsteh@aus.social)

Urgh. This is... rather disturbing. Even if you're a major AI proponent, you surely have to acknowledge that using AI effectively - i.e. being properly productive rather than generating slop and misinformation - requires solid critical thinking skills. But sure, let's have AI teach kids during the foundational years when they don't yet have those skills and are supposed to be growing them. It's not like we're not seeing enough fallout from use of AI in education as it is.
Some of the nation’s rich are letting AI teach their kids: https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/961505/wealthy-ai-schools-alpha-forge-prep

Last year, I moved all of my personal stuff to a mini PC, which has been working really well for the most part. It has no monitor. On the few occasions I've needed sighted help, I just connected via VNC from a laptop with a screen. But I needed to change a BIOS setting, so VNC wasn't an option and I didn't want to cart it somewhere else to connect it to a TV or whatever.
It turns out that contrary to my expectations, USB HDMI video capture devices are quite cheap these days (AUD$30ish). So I bought one and connected it to a laptop. The video capture device shows up like a camera.
Once I was streaming the video from that, I was able to use Be My Eyes desktop to repeatedly take screenshots. OCR worked too, but it doesn't provide sufficient info to tell which option is selected. Direct streaming meant I didn't have to worry about positioning a camera, etc. With some prompting, Be My Eyes was able to give me enough information to tell me which option I had selected, what it was set to, how to get to the option I needed with the arrow keys, etc.
Doing it this way was definitely kinda tedious, but it's nevertheless pretty awesome that I could do this without sighted help and without having to faf about with a camera.

I've recently jumped on the Tailscale bandwagon and am loving it. What's astounding to me is that in several days of using it as a screen reader user, I've encountered only a single minor accessibility issue across web, Windows and iOS. It is an absolute dream to use from an #accessibility standpoint, even its "visual" access controls editor. In a world where most tech products (*especially* those from high value tech companies and startups) are riddled with painful accessibility papercuts at best, complete barriers at worst, this is actually incredible. And unlike some tech companies that publicly wax lyrical about how they have such a great accessibility model and how everyone should learn from their work, then ship utter crap that is utterly exhausting to use for people with disabilities, Tailscale has just done the work without any public grandstanding. I don't give such praise lightly, but it's nice to be able to call out great accessibility work for a change. Thanks @tailscale. Please keep up the good work and don't let it slip as you grow.

Of all the questionable things about AI, I'm starting to think its biggest crime is simply the staggering amount of resources it has pointlessly drawn away from other, more important work and the way it has corrupted even organisations that were previously doing great work in some misguided, race-to-the-bottom belief that this is actually the most important thing for humankind.

Oh. I've just realised why the accessibility of the Aira web app is so screwy. For example, you can't press enter on many of the buttons with NVDA browse mode; you have to route the mouse to them and click like it's 1987.
It uses Flutter.
Really?
Seriously?

In today's episode of #accessibility shit-fuckery, GitHub have changed pull request reviews so that you have to hover the line of code in order for the add line comment button to appear. I guess they must be using AI for all their code now as their CEO believes is right and proper, and they forgot to disable the AI's ableism.

@amir @NVAccess There is almost always a price somewhere, some time for hacking around bugs in the wrong layer, even if that's as simple as months spent figuring out a workaround which means months spent not being able to work on higher priority bugs. Maybe JAWS hacked around this one, but maybe it causes some other bug you hate down the line. You're assuming Microsoft won't address this, but pressure on them from many different angles sometimes does work, albeit less often than we'd all like. Still, it is always worth trying that approach first. Hacking around the bug still remains a last resort if Microsoft absolutely refuse to address it going forward.

@NVAccess @amir Are you suggesting screen readers should hack around every problem in every piece of software? Honestly, that's how things used to be done decades ago and it caused a heap of problems. Instead, the vast majority of issues now do actually get fixed in the right place, with much better results overall.

@NVAccess @amir No insider knowledge. However, at least one other user reports that this same bug occurs with Narrator, even though your own experience seems to disagree with that. If that's the case, it's almost certainly a bug in Windows. Working around a bug in the wrong layer is always going to be hacky and brittle to some extent. For want of a better analogy, it's like arguing about reality: Windows says one thing, the screen reader overrides that with its own definition. It's sometimes necessary, of course - far too often honestly - but best avoided.

@NVAccess @amir I did look at your original message multiple times and I still see nothing about priority, just about history repeating itself and effectively beingtold to live with it. Maybe there's a separate post that I can't see for some reason. At any rate, even putting aside legal concerns, hiring more devs would require significant additional funding, which takes us back to the challenges of managing additional funding obligations.

@NVAccess @amir We'd all probably agree more full time devs would be a good thing. We have worked very hard to make our current level of funding more sustainable, as well as securing additional funds. Hiring full time devs means being able to guarantee employment, which is a very serious commitment, and also training those devs. What you're saying isn't untrue, but the way you're saying it suggests that you perhaps underestimate our awareness of the need for more resources or the constant work that goes into exactly that problem behind the scenes.

@NVAccess @amir Yes, it has. Limited resources will always result in something taking a back seat, especially where there are contractual obligations involved. Something always has to give. There's no other way to slice this.

@NVAccess @amir To make matters even more interesting, going back to your original issue, I can't even reproduce it, and I tried pretty hard. If that's true for any other dev, that's going to make diagnosing and working around this near impossible.

@amir @NikJov @NVAccess Wow. The accessibility tree in the Start Menu is really screwed up. It'd be nice if Microsoft could use their own APIs properly for a change. Makes this even harder to investigate.

@amir @NikJov @NVAccess Do you know if JAWS ever enters virtual PC cursor (roughly equivalent to browse mode) in the Start Menu? Or does it rely entirely on Start menu keyboard navigation?

@NikJov @amir @NVAccess Right, so equivalent to my try build in this respect, freezes and inconsistent suggestion reading aside?

A bit under a year ago, my friend Michael Sheppard and I released our first album. I'm super excited to present our second album, Toward Hope.
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/0xBJ5vL27iorzYVl1x5Uuo
Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/au/album/toward-hope/1814964243
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_mV5sK-yiWucpTLGCc4QckQzLpPEzLRbXY

@KaraLG84 I wonder whether it's just really bad silence removal with a poorly set noise gate and no proofing?

A few years ago, I wrote a web audio game based on an old Eureka A4 game called Aliens. The original version was purely audio. I just added some visualisation to see whether it would be potentially more engaging (and easier to learn) for sighted folks. Given that I'm totally blind and not particularly adept with CSS, the visualisation is kinda crappy, but I got my kids to help me check that it at least works. I haven't had anyone with sight test it on mobile, so it's likely completely broken there and thus I'd recommend desktop for now. Anyway, here it is if anyone's interested: https://files.jantrid.net/aliens/

@joachim @juliette Totally blind screen reader user here. You're correct: mixed case is better to separate words, where all lower case may result in something unintelligible without extra effort for the user. I think the benefits of this extend beyond screen reader users though; i.e. all lower case could be difficult even for some sighted users to interpret, though I can't cite evidence for that.